I always thought I should make more of it. I even took a website design class. I created a draft version of a very pretty website. And it sat there on my computer for years. I had no idea how to get it published. Two years ago I finally figured out that I needed to purchase a domain name. So I did. But that sat there too. When Facebook came along, I figured it out to some degree, though I only have personal pages – no business page.

Then along came Amy, a new doula on the block, with some really neat ideas. She hoped to develop a website and call it ChicagoDoula.net. I agreed to this because after all, though I’d been using the name for years, I did not yet have a website and thought I would never get around to it. Amy began building the site and after a time we realized it was something we could work on together. We began to think of ChicagoDoula as a concept rather than a specific person and several months later, here we are.

Who is ChicagoDoula? She is a little bit of everything, just like the city she serves. She is an activist, a doula, a mother, a midwife (of babies or ideas or communities), a mentor and a student. She is experienced and wise, yet she is fresh and enthusiastic and full of new ideas. She is knowledgeable about a variety of childbirth preparation techniques and is comfortable working with them. She believes that life is precious and she also believes in a woman’s right to make a full range of decisions about her reproductive health care – whether that means choosing to terminate a pregnancy, choosing an epidural for labor, or choosing a homebirth with an underground midwife. She strives to help women understand the full implications of their choices and help them find their innate power, so their choices are not driven by fear. She understands that there is no single right answer for any given situation. She is willing to support women in whatever choice is right for them.

ChicagoDoula loves her city and the people in it. She joyfully serves families from all walks of life. She is ever-hopeful with a strong vein of cynical, anti-racist, queer-friendly, working on recognizing her privileges as well as her own internalized oppression, challenging others and herself to see and understand things differently. When faced with obstacles, she looks for creative solutions rather than struggling to achieve particular outcomes.

She envisions a world where all women get the support they need across the spectrum of pregnancy, labor, birth and parenting – a world where every woman in every community has access to the information and support she wants and needs so that she can be affirmed in her choices.

She envisions a world where women are respected, safe, honored and empowered.

In short, ChicagoDoula is many things. We invite you to get to know her, us, as we continue posting here and continue building our websites.

But instead!… Instead, I got to spend it doing something I love! Something that is truly an honor. And I was rewarded by witnessing the birth of a completely posterior (and asynclitic!) baby. For those of you who don’t speak “Obstetric”, that can be a very tough birth and frequently results in a cesarean rather than vaginal delivery. Anyway – it was simply a miracle. I do love my job.

And now I am enjoying one of my favorite meals after a long day (and night) of doula work: Thai food (Panang noodles that were waiting for me in the fridge) and a dirty gin martini.

But the especially cool thing is that along with it, I got to read through so many birthday wishes from such a fantastic group of people. I got a little weepy (either the sleep deprivation or the gin or both) and thought I’d write a bit just to say: “Thank You!!” I am so glad I get to stay connected with each and every one of you.

I feel very blessed this January 23rd.

…And in case you want to know more about preventing posterior positioning – or ways to try turning a baby who’s already there. Check out spinningbabies.com!

In my first pregnancy, this part of my preparation included taking a Birthing From Within class, chatting with my midwives about when they would be there and asking my best friend if she would come as well. I never considered hiring a doula because, in addition to my partner and my best friend, I had not one or two, but three midwives. I figured I’d be set for support. I learned through first hand experience why, even with five loving, supportive people in the room, that a doula to offer continuous labor support might have been a good idea.

A doula is someone who is knowledgeable about normal birth and familiar with possible medical interventions in a way that most family and friends are not. She gets to know you and your desires before birth so that she can better help you when you are in the thick of it. In labor she can be a buffer or bridge depending on the need. She can translate from “obstetric” language to everyday language in the event that parents misinterpret doctors, nurses or midwives.

On the day of your baby’s birth your doula is someone who will remain with you continuously and whose role is unique. She is someone who will not be having a baby that day (or grandchild, niece or nephew). She won’t be watching a loved one in pain and isn’t likely to be overwhelmed by the resulting combination of high running emotions and exhaustion common for laboring parents. She is someone who will be on-call for you, get to know you, who will accompany you through the whole process and who will not be attending dozens of other births that week or that month.

Even if your midwife or doctor can be on call for you, your doula will be there to attend to your emotional and spiritual well being in a way that your midwife or doctor simply will not.

The beauty of continuous labor support from a doula is that it can look however a laboring mother needs it to look. For one woman this might mean a constant companion there to hold her hand and speak words of encouragement and reassurance through each contraction, then wipe the sweat from her brow, and stroke her hair in between… and for another it might mean a trusted presence knitting in the next room, holding the space, listening and keeping watch, at the ready if needed, but out of sight and earshot in order for this woman to have the privacy she needs to birth in her own body. Both are forms of continuous support. For many mothers, the support they instinctively want and need shifts through the course of labor depending on where they are and what else is happening around them and, ultimately, may include a combination of a little bit of both of these ends of the spectrum.

For yet another woman, the term continuous labor support could mean having a person there solely for the purpose of backing up her husband or partner – offering reassurance, water, and suggestions to her partner as he or she stays physically and emotionally in contact with the mother. Sometimes a team approach works best and a partner can remain in front of a laboring mother maintaining eye contact, while a doula provides massage and counter pressure on her back or hips from behind her. It’s the mother’s facial expressions, body language or directly spoken requests that tell her doula what support she needs in any given moment.

On the day your baby is born, your doula will most likely be the one and only person in the room in that in between space who can understand what is happening from multiple perspectives. She will work to get to know you to get a sense of who you are emotionally and spiritually as well as what fears and hopes you have for your labor, birth and postpartum period.

A doula is also familiar with terms of midwifery and obstetrics. She knows her way around a labor and delivery room and can be trusted to explain medical terms or proposed procedures. Yet she isn’t a part of the medical staff and influenced by the powerful force of a hospital’s or particular practice’s work routines and day-to-day rhythms and expectations for birth. Most importantly, she is someone who is comfortable with and knows birth and knows the value and benefits of the unique kind of continuous labor support she offers.

Midwives and doctors must focus on fetal and maternal health and safety and may not be able or inclined to consistently attend to a mother’s emotional needs – especially if she wants more support early on before “active labor” has begun.

Friends who offer loving support but are unfamiliar with or at all wary of birth, can miss how important it is that support begin early in labor and be continuous. They can also be unprepared to help parents make difficult decisions along the way – during active labor and pushing as well as in the immediate postpartum period.

And partners who remain present throughout with no one else to back them up can get exhausted or emotionally overwhelmed.

Each of these possibilities were in fact realities in my first labor and birth. It seemed fitting then, that at my second birth, in addition to loving family and friends, I had not one, but two doulas (and just one midwife). My doulas offered me what I now understand was the invaluable benefit of continuous labor support.

While I approached so many aspects of birth and first time parenthood very differently than dooce (I had a home birth, she had a hospital birth. I used Pantley, she used Ferber…), I never let that stop me from reading. So much of what she was going through in pregnancy and postpartum reflected my own reality – and as it turned out, that of thousands of other women. In fact, speaking of tmi, when I was working full time and away from my baby during the day, I reserved my breastmilk pumping time for reading dooce. Her touching stories of her own postpartum struggles – and plentiful, gorgeous pictures of her baby girl – increased my let down!

I checked in on her daily and was grateful for her willingness to share her life with millions of strangers. When she was hospitalized with Postpartum Depression I remember telling a good friend how shaken I was because I saw so much of myself in her writing.

Fast forward several years, I had a second child, was working on becoming a doula and birth mentor, and was still reading dooce as she got pregnant again, suffered a miscarriage, and then happily carried her next pregnancy to term.

In her first labor story five years earlier, she’d had several “standard” medical interventions beginning with Pitocin to augment her labor, an eventual epidural and an episiotomy as her baby was crowning. I wondered and looked forward to seeing how her story would unfold the second time around.

So when she finally wrote it- in three installments – I was absolutely delighted that attending another mama’s birth, hiring a doula and reading Birthing From Within were part of her story! It was dooce at her best: hysterically funny, heartfelt, grounded – and open to an amazing transformation. Labor and birth stories can have so much power and I am thrilled that I can share this one with you:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Here is a sampling of the articles and blogs that have caught my interest as of late. They span birth, motherhood, breastfeeding, feminism, racism and a bit of pop culture thrown in:

LA Times, “Childbirth: Can the US Improve?”

Henci Goer: Elective Induction of Labor

From Healthy Times “Risk to Baby Rises With Repeat C-Sections”

MamaHeartsBaby: A Baby Came Out of My Vagina

Science and Sensibility: First, Do No Harm: Another Reason to Ditch Routine IVs in Labor

Hoyden About Town: Missing The Point Awards, Manchester poster edition

Chicago HypnoBirthing: Kismet

Anti-Racist Parent: Just Like Me

Birth Write: Remembering Pearls of Mothering Advice

Hit Me Back!: Thoughts on the Mom-in-Chief

Womanist Musings: What White Women Can Do

Nov 30: A Sad Day for This Trekkie

Feel free to add your own!

When it comes to how we picture women moving in labor, we often don’t. It is rare to find images of women laboring in any way other than sitting or lying down in bed – as if to say that labor pain is so immobilizing that it literally lays women out. Yet, for normal birth, just the opposite is true: rather than laying women out, early labor pain encourages women to move our bodies in just the right way to help babies come through.

Yet, these images make sense when we think about the not too distant past of birth in our culture – when birth was hospitalized and women were routinely fully medicated and in twilight sleep while their babies were delivered for them by obstetricians. It also makes sense that, as women and expectant parents have struggled to reclaim low-risk, healthy birth as a non-medical event, there is a lag in our collective consciousness reflected, in turn, in our popular images. Those pictures, tv shows and movie clips of birthing parents as panicked patients are what has been, until recently, all that was readily available in contemporary popular culture.

How fabulous that now that we have DIY online video services it is possible to find so many more examples of empowering birth. With women making noise! And moving around however they like! The flipside, of course, is that there is a whole lot more of the same old stuff out there as well. So, I have sifted through quite a lot of it for you to find what I think are a few gems.

Here are five videos of women vocalizing, moving and remaining present during labor. They are from hospital and home births, and illustrate so much more than the power of sound and movement. You’ll get the fullest effect with the volume up, and be advised: some of them may be a bit noisy for work. Enjoy!

Singing and rocking on a birth ball during part of labor:

Moving and making noise in a whole home water birth story:

Moving, moaning (and more water!) in one contraction:

LOTS of different moving, positions and comfort techniques in a whole hospital birth story: